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Marion Gibson, "Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials" (Scribner, 2023)
00:49:26
An interview with Marion Gibson
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to have with me today Dr. Marian Gibson, to tell us all about her book titled a history in 13 trials, published this year by Simon and Schuster. This is a fascinating book that pretty much does exactly what it says. It tells us the global history of witchcraft and witch trials by focusing on 13, 13 significant trials through centuries, really, to help us understand what is going on with witch trials and witch hunts and witch accusations and all of those things. But before I get too excited and too ahead of myself, Marian, thank you so much for being with us on the show.
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C
No problem, Miranda. It's lovely to be here.
- [01:54]
B
Before we dive into your fascinating book, would you mind introducing yourself a little bit and explaining why you decided to write this?
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C
Yes. So I'm a professor at Exeter University, and I encountered the subject of witch trials many years ago, over a quarter of a century ago now, which seems like a very long time. And I was given an account of a witch trial, so a kind of early newspaper account, basically an Elizabethan witchcraft pamphlet. And I looked at this thing and thought, just like you said, what is going on here? Why are these people telling these stories of magic? Why do they think their Neighbors are witches. Why are some of them confessing to being witches? Why would they do that? And the thing that really interested me was that we were hearing from obscure people, people who were very likely illiterate, who lived in obscure villages. This was a little case from Elizabethan Essex, and a lot of them were women. And that interested me very much because as well as talking to us about witchcraft, they were talking to us about their daily lives and I hadn't heard from those people before. That was what really excited me about this. So my interest has always been in witch trials, but it's also particularly been in the history of accused women and accusing women and the way that they used stories of magic to talk about themselves.
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B
Really very intriguing motivation and allows us to kind of get on into the book. So obviously the title tells us something about the structure of this, a history in 13 trials. But as one reads, the book realises, obviously there's way more than 13 trials that have happened. So how did you choose 13? How did you decide which trials to include? Sort of talk us through the structure of the book a bit, please.
- [03:46]
C
Well, we've got 700 years to cover here, so it wasn't particularly easy deciding which trials to include. For the first part of the book, I picked some biggies. So I picked Salem and the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, trials of. Of the English Civil War, because, you know, those are big ones that people will have heard of and they've both been trials that I've been specifically interested in the past. And I picked ones which had significant people involved in them that people might have heard of, say, for example, Heinrich Kramer or Kramer, who wrote Malice Maleficarum, that the hammer of which is the big medieval demonology. I start with a trial that involves him. So that was a kind of easy spot to start, really, 1485 and keep going. And in the second part of the book, I tried to think about the way that the idea of the witch is received now in contemporary culture. So they're witch trials in the sense that they all involve witchcraft or magic, but each of them showcases a different aspect of the way that the idea of the witch trial has been used. And that part, the second part of the book and the third part move from the 18th century to the present. So we've got a trial from 18th century France where people are fighting essentially over what. Which means, you know, this is the quotes, Age of Reason. What are we going to do with this old concept? And then we move forward to the 19th and 20th centuries. So we've got the trial of a spiritualist medium. We've got the. The informal trial, the sort of extra court trial of clergyman accused of Satanism. And then towards the end of the book, we move forward and move around the. Really. So we look at cases in Africa and North America where people have either been accused of real, if you like, witchcraft, so really harming their neighbors, really worshiping the devil, or they've been called witches for other reasons, or they've claimed to be involved in a witch hunt. And we know some famous people who've claimed that recently. So I tried to, over the course of 700 years, take people on a tour of what the word witch meant in different eras and what the idea of the witch trial meant in different eras and what it might mean today, if that makes sense.
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B
Sense it does. And you've just summarised that so, like, neatly and tidily that it very much, I think, belies the amount of work that went into figuring all that out.
- [06:14]
C
Yes, it wasn't a neat and tidy process.
- [06:18]
B
Not surprised. But it's resulted in quite a neat and tidy book in a lot of senses. So thinking obviously about a witch trial, there's kind of two obvious sides, and obviously it's more complicated than that. But starting with the two obvious sides, can you tell us about the kinds of characteristics that people are likely to have if they're the ones being accused of witchcraft and to what extent those characteristics have changed over this time period?
- [06:45]
C
This is one of the structuring, you know, tricks of the book, really, to get people to think about whether these are the same types of people or not. And the things I think remain the same are that a very large majority of them, in most cases, in most jurisdictions across history, are women. Women. And that's important. So it's a book about gender history. But also they very often tend to be poor people. Not exclusively, again, but quite often they tend to be people who stand out in society in some way, whether that's because they're deemed to be heretical or they're thought to be subversive in some way, or they've been. They've been noisy, they've been noticeable in some way in their community. Sometimes that is about sexual transgressions. So you. People in the past who have illegitimate children, people in the present who are gay or queer or have an approach to sexuality, which society doesn't always favor, those kind of people tend to get accused right the way across the seven centuries. And there are other elements too. So there is stuff about class and money. There are issues about fraud and criminality that tend to come up over and over again. So somebody might be accused of witchcraft because simultaneously they are being accused of fraud or something else. So those are the characteristics that I think hold the book together over time. But one of the interesting things I found was that those things sometimes apply to accusers as well. It's really interesting the way that witchcraft is used to talk about those sorts of issues, both by accusers and by accused. So quite often that idea of magic is associated with trickery. So, you know, fraud and witchcraft fit quite nicely together. Who is it who is tricking us? Is the accuser who's making something up, this terrible story about their neighbour being a witch? Or is it the accused witch themselves who is, you know, tricking us with the aid of demonic illusions or whatever? And stuff about gender comes up on. On both sides, too. A lot of the accusers are women. And that was something that I wanted the book to talk about. You know, the kind of competition between women that we see in the past, but also we see today in culture, the way that culture tends to set up good women versus bad women and play on those. So I've tried really, throughout the book to keep coming back to those same characterist. And the book ends with a list of characteristics that people might want to look out for if they're being asked to consider the idea of a witch trial or they're being asked to persecute somebody. It's really a book about what are the traits of persecuted people? Why is this? How does this last over time? Is there anything we can do about it?
- [09:31]
B
Which is really quite useful to kind of put those things together. And I think brings the book beyond just history and very much into current events as well. Thinking about the.
- [09:43]
C
No, no, that's fine. I really wanted it to be a relevant book. I've written lots of books about witches in history before, and they're all academic books. This is my first Trade Booker, you know, crossover book. And I really wanted people to look at it and think, yes, yes, yes, you know, but this is not history really anymore. Some of this is clearly historical. You know, this happened in 1485 or 1645 or whatever. But I also recognize these traits in society today. That's what I wanted readers to go away with. So I took a bit of a step outside my comfort zone, really, and stopped setting everything in the past and just let it be something that people could find relevance in their own lives to, so that they could actually use the book in different ways. If that makes sense.
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B
Very much so. And I think, obviously part of that relevance is, as you said, the characteristics of those accused and persecuted, but also, of course, the characteristics of those doing the accusing, doing the witch hunting. So what sorts of characteristics do these people tend to have, and to what extent are these consistent over time?
- [10:51]
C
Interestingly, they too are often people who step outside of the social norm in some way. So they're notable because they have been accused of something, perhaps. So Heinrich grammar, accused of embezzlement and bullying and all sorts of nasty stuff. And in other circumstances, you can see how he too, might have treated as heretical. He certainly gets himself into some awful trouble when he tries to accuse witches in Innsbruck in the first trial in the book. And I wanted readers to think about, you know, where the. Where the balance is between accused and accuser, where the power is. It's quite easy for the accuser to lose power in certain circumstances and themselves end up being demonized. So I wanted them to think about that. So often accusers of people who are themselves quite notable, maybe they are a bit noisy in their society, maybe people have turned upon them in certain ways, and one of the ways that they then deflect suspicion and criticism from themselves is to accuse other people of witchcraft. And I think we see that towards the end of the book, too. You know, that the key person shouting witch hunt in contemporary times is Donald Trump, who has been accused, rightly I think, of all sorts of other things, and uses that phrase witch hunt, as a deflector. So I tried to talk throughout the book about the way in which the accusers are finding witches to demonize because they themselves are under threat in some way or they consider themselves to be. So the Salem accusers, Matthew Hopkins and his friends in Civil War Essex, you know, they were people, too, who were living under considerable threat, whether it was threat from civil war going on around them or threat from Native American attacks. There are two American trials, one in Virginia in the 1620s and the other one in Salem in the 1690s, the famous one. And the sets of people who are doing the accusing live under the same sort of threat as those that they are accusing of witchcraft. You know, they too are in danger of starvation and Native American attack. You know, quite understandably, they're starving in many ways, and they're very exposed to ideas of sin and blame in their own lives. And so I tried to look at the way that those people have turned on others, in part as a mechanism for defining themselves and defending themselves. So accusers are quite Often problematic people, but sometimes they're very powerful people, too. And again, Donald Trump is a good example. Yes, he's been accused of various things, but still, you know, a very powerful white male in charge of one of the world superpowers. He's a very powerful person. And if you look back into history, you can see other witch accusers who are similar. King James VI of Scotland, for example, who accuses some women of witchcraft in the 1580s and 90s. And he turns up in the book the Governors of the Virginia Colony, the governors of the Massachusetts Colony. Those people were also very powerful. I've looked at a Norwegian trial from the 1620s where, again, the king is involved tangentially, but importantly through his local governor. Quite often there are people who are authority figures who are stamping down on what they see as dissent or problem and deflecting anger and suspicion from their own activities in some ways by picking on others. So a lot of it is about scapegoating. Sometimes the accusers are powerful folk and they find ways to distract attention from their own activities by pointing to others and saying, that group over there. That's the problem. And obviously, we see this a lot in contemporary society. Race is a big issue within the book. And one the things that I wanted to explore is the way that it's often indigenous people or migrant people who are being accused and scapegoated. And of course, that's very resonant in society today, too.
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B
Very much so. I think a lot of those characteristics, even people who may not be familiar with James I and 6, they're like. But that does sound similar to some other people. So, okay, yeah, making a lot of links there already. You mentioned, obviously, what happened in Innsbruck in 1485 a few times, and that is the first trial in the book. So can you tell us about kind of why you chose this as the starting point?
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C
It was partly because of Heinrich Rame. I thought, well, he is an important figure and a lot of people will have heard of him. And if people are going to name a demonology, it's probably going to Malleus Maleficarum that they know about. You know, you can argue about how significant it is in actuality, and people have done that, but it's. It's the big name. It's the one that people know. But alongside of that, and very importantly, I became really interested in the key accused person, woman called Helena Scheiberin. And she was fascinating because she spoke up, she challenged the witch hunter, and ultimately, you know, not to. Not to give too Much away about the trial. She is a lot more successful in defending herself than people might expect her to be. So I really saw the opportunity there for looking at a key witch hunter, but also giving a lot of time and space in the chapter to the person who in many, you know, many ways was his victim and is often portrayed that way. You know, people, historians have looked at Helena and thought, well, she's a bit troublesome, isn't she? Oh, she. She's a bit noisy. Shouldn't she just have. Have accepted the. The accusations and tried to defend herself in a modest and quiet manner and not gone after Kramer as she does, saying, you're the heretic, not me, you know, you're the witch hunter. She curses him in the street, she spits at him, she refuses to go to his sermons. Wow. So I thought, this is a very, very interesting woman. And we don't hear that much from her at the trial, but we hear some significant phrases, reported things that she said, and at the trial itself, she starts refusing to answer questions. And that really is a key moment. That's a key tipping point. So I was very excited by the opportunity to tell Helena's story as well as Heinrich Kramer.
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B
This. Yeah, I have to say, reading it, I had multiple moments of like, okay, that's not what I expected was going to happen. That's brilliant. So it was definitely a really, I thought, interesting way to open a book up that's trying to raise a lot of these questions of who is accused and who is doing the accusing and why. It kind of brings a lot of those things into focus, I think, because it doesn't necessarily pan out exactly the way that we'd expect.
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C
I did want to start with a surprise. Yes. I wanted to start with a trial that wasn't just, oh, this man accused this woman, and she was essentially judicially murdered, and this was horrible. I didn't want it to be a kind of festival of gloom and despair and the same story over and over again? So we do start with a trial that does actually challenge some of the reader's expectations. And, yeah, I really enjoyed doing that.
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B
I mean, it was great reading. So I think it worked pretty well.
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C
I'm glad to hear it.
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B
Thinking about some of the other trials in that first period of the book, I think, particularly listeners familiar with European religious history, thinking about things like 1485 and seven centuries will realise at some point we've got the Reformation happening here, obviously at slightly different times in different countries, but very much a pretty big deal. And yet it's not like the Reformation magically stops witch trials or that they don't start until the Reformation. So what impact did the Reformation have on conceptions of witches, on incentives for witch trials?
- [18:41]
C
It was one of the most difficult parts of the book to write, actually. The editors kept coming back to me and saying, can you just explain that knotty point about the difference between Catholic and Protestants, or can you just tell us who these other people are, who, you know, you're calling Puritans? It was actually very difficult. Anybody who's ever tried to explain the Reformation to a class of students will know exactly what I'm talking about. And then, you know, you add on a group of readers who might not even be familiar with the basic concept. So I had to spend quite a bit of time thinking, how do I get this across? The way I summarized it in the end was that, like you said, it didn't have as much impact as you might expect. It would be a very nice, neat story, wouldn't it? If we started with Heinrich Kramer, you know, Dominican monk, and we said, ah, well, you see, the Catholics, they persecuted the witches, and then the Protestants came along and they didn't. And it was all very neatly done, but of course, actually they carried right on. So one of the things I had to get across was how demonology really runs as a thread across all the Christian sects that I talked about. And I tried to get across the way in which Christianity, as it's talked about in the book, is essentially a binary system. So it doesn't really matter which sect you are part of. You still believe in that binary of God and the devil. You still believe in the binary of God. People who are, you know, the lovely churchmen around you and the devil's people, the wicked witches over there. And I thought about ways in which I could get that across. And one of the things that also structured the book was picking a very large number of different sects. So we do get Catholic trials, we do get Protestant trials. We get trials in different types of jurisdiction, you know, inquisitional ones and accusatorial ones. We get trials in, in Anglican Virginia, and we get trials in godly Massachusetts. So I tried to get people to think about the ways that it's really Christianity that is one of the issues here. The book doesn't cover the whole globe. It covers essentially the Christian and Christianized world. So we end up with African pentecostalism and with QAnon conspiracy theories, which are partly, only partly structured by Christian thinking. So that was one of the ways that I tried to approach it. The Reformation doesn't change things as much as you might expect, and in a sense it's slightly less significant than you might expect. Therefore, I mean, one of the things I think is going on in that early modern period is that the Reformation and the religious conflict that accompanies it causes people to seek out heretics and that ends up causing people to seek out witches. So if you like, it's an important motor of the era of the big witch hunts, but then after that it just kind of putters along and keeps going. So I try to get readers to think about that. Really. The Reformation is an important, important starting point, but it's by no means the whole story. There's a whole lot of other stuff going on too. So good, so good, so good.
- [21:41]
D
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C
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- [22:32]
B
Definitely not neat and tidy. No, but very important to kind of understand that nuance. And similarly, obviously one of the super famous trials you mentioned briefly is Salem, Massachusetts. Again, though, there is context that we're missing if we just focus on that particular trial to understand the history of witch trials in the United States and you helpfully make sure that we don't fall into that trap by bringing us back to a earlier witch trial. Actually the actual first one in the United States. That's 70 years before Salem, which is quite a bit longer than I expected. What does adding this new trial into our conception of witch trials in the US Help us understand that?
- [23:20]
C
I thought it was really important to put this one in because I remember my own surprise when I discovered it. You know, I didn't, you know, I didn't discover it in the sense that nobody had written about it, but I was astonished when I stumbled across it. And this is the trial of Joan Wright in Virginia in 1626. So, yeah, a very, very long time before Salem. And I thought it was important that Salem isn't the, you know, the token American representative of witch trials in the book, which does tend to be the role that it does sometimes play in accounts of the period of the witch hunts. You know, the Anglicans and the governors of the Virginia Company were just as interested in persecuting witches, it turns out, as the later godly clerics and congregation of Salem were. So I found it helpful in that it introduced the idea that no sooner had people got to the New World than they started looking out for scapegoats and persecuting witches churches. But also that again, it was not a specific sect that was responsible here. It was the kind of wider Christian communion, if you like. And also that different types of governance, different types of structures. You know, Virginia is completely different from Salem in terms of its, Its, you know, the arrangements of its charter, the. The legal background. So they're using English law rather than their own localized law like the people of Massachusetts were 70 years later. It's a completely different picture and even things like its gender politics and its milit are very different. So I thought it was useful in terms of introducing people to the idea, which once again, I hope came as a surprise that there is a lot more to the story of American witch trials than Salem. It starts a lot earlier and it starts in a context that you really wouldn't expect, actually very much so, especially.
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B
Given, as you said, how different Virginia and Massachusetts were at the time. There's some kind of eerie similarities, I think, between the cases, which makes that point very effective moving forward chronologically and of course across the ocean to France. You have a trial in, I guess. Okay, to be fair, I didn't exactly count which number this is within the 13, but it felt sort of in the middle because you talk about this trial of Mary Catherine and Jean Baptiste as being a turning point in which.
- [25:48]
C
Trial history, how that was a really complicated one too. So, yeah, it is. It's right in the middle. I think it's number seven. So it's, it's. We've got six trials in, in what you might call the early modern period, culminating in Salem, and then we move forward to 18th century France to think about what happens when what Keith Thomas called the period of decline. And obviously lots of people have challenged that notion since, but I think that the wider public tend to think, oh, that's the period of the decline of the witch trials, isn't it? You know, that's when they all end. And again, I wanted to complicate that pie picture and get people to think about how the idea of the witch was still very, very useful to society and would carry on being so. So, yeah, Mary Catherine is a very young woman. You know, she's in her twenties when we start her story, and she goes to confession and she goes to her local Catholic cathedral, as people in her city did, and there she meets a new confessor, Jean Baptiste Girard, who she ultimately ends up accusing of raping her and of procuring an abortion for her and of abusing her and the group of girls who he is tutoring in, in the Catholic religion. And they end up, bizarrely enough, Mary Catherine and Jean Baptiste end up accusing each other of witchcraft as part of this wider, you know, appalling sexual scandal that engulfs the. The Catholic Church in southern France in the 1730s. So I wanted that to be, again, the idea of a turning point, you know, a significant moment in history where the idea of the witch is brought to the fore, challenged, interrogated, redefined in some ways. And I wanted people to think about the very difficult balance that I've talked about before between the accused and accusers. You know, both of these people are being accused of sexual criminality. Both of these people are being accused of magical criminality. Both of them are being accused of fraud and lies, lies and deception. And I wanted to try and explore that. That was very difficult to do. But I hope one of the things that people come out of that chapter thinking about is, oh, this is a lot more complicated than we thought it was. It's a lot more modern than we thought it was, a lot more relevant. And the outcome of the trial is also really interesting because there's that constant sense that it could have gone either way. And I want people to pay more attention to that. Throughout history of witch trials, I think, you know, as with the trial of Helena Schoenberg, go either way. And they're not always a foregone conclusion. So I included it for all of those sorts of reasons. And, yes, it's right in the middle of the book. It's kind of the hinge of the book on which everything turns, if you like.
- [28:38]
B
So I'd love to ask you a little bit more about that case because I found one of the. In addition to kind of the things you've talked about before, of including if it's more complicated than you thought it could have gone either way, it also seemed to be important because of the kind of how the law treated the Accusation of witchcraft and how the precedent that that set going forward, because there seemed to me to be quite a difference between kind of what, the weight of the witch accusation before this trial and the way it was treated afterwards. Could you maybe tell us a bit about that?
- [29:12]
C
Yes, it's a development that's been waiting to happen for about four or five decades by the time we get to the 1730s. And it's that moment where people are forced in a show trial to ask the question, do we really believe in witchcraft in the way that our ancestors did, say, in the 1630s or the 1680s? You know, are we in the 1730s really the same kind of people with the same kind of religious outlook? And don't we have anything new to bring to this discussion of demonology? And, of course, it turns out they do have new things to bring to it, and they structure the trial around a very vague and unhelpful royal edict from the 1680s. So, again, you know, this is something that's been waiting to blow up for a while. This edict has been sitting there. And the edict starts to redefine the idea of witchcraft as being to do with trickery and poisoning rather than being to do with devil worship and harming your neighbors, which is the kind of weight that it carried before, as you say. So that sort of hinge moment is really important. And it's. It's also very complicated legally. I found it very interesting exploring one trial after another. Legal systems often break down in the face of this kind of complexity. They just cannot deal with the shifting definitions of what witchcraft is and with the incredibly complicated ethical and moral picture that a witch trial presents to, you know, whatever type of jury or parliament or monarch or whoever's doing the judging. And it was very difficult from that point of view to get it across. I. Yeah, I still look back at that one and think, is that really clear? And I hope it is. It goes through the trial, goes through a variety of different courts. For the first time in the book, we have different defense witnesses and lawyers as well as a prosecution team. And we have the two principals who are accusing each other kind of getting into the mix. And we have a variety of different judges who have an incredibly complicated system for judging the people in front of them. And the whole thing just breaks down into this kind of appalling, you know, spaghetti like, mess in the end. And I thought that was important. Again, not cut and dried, not what you expect, not the outcome you expect is just very, very challenging for society. And that sense of witchcraft and Magic is offering continual challenge to the human intellect and to religion and to ethics is, I think, something I wanted readers to think about throughout the book. And it becomes particularly pointed in this trial because both sides are saying to the other side, you're the witch. What do we do with that? What do. What does society do when there is mutual accusation of that kind and magic is involved and the society has, to a larger extent, to be determined, if you like, in any given circumstance, stop believing in magic and witchcraft.
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B
I found this really interesting because essentially, to make a complicated story short, it sounds like the court just kind of said, okay, well, let's deal with the accusations, but we're not going to deal with the witchcraft bit. We're just going to take that bit out. You can accuse each other in the press all you like, but that's no longer going to be a legal charge, which was absolutely fascinating to see that change over time. And as you said, it really reveals kind of the multiple sticky points. Ethics, politics, who's in power. And, of course, that's not the only trial where all of these sticky bits come up. So I'd love to ask you about kind of, I guess, a group of trials that maybe I've artificially put together.
- [33:14]
C
Go ahead. Yes.
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B
But all seem to sort of have this difficulty. One of the sticky points that they're dealing with is kind of explicitly around colonial power and prosecuting indigenous people. And this was fascinating because it came up in the book in quite different times and places. So Norway in the early 1600s, Massachusetts in the late 1600s, Lesotho in southern Africa in the 1940s. 40s. And yet there were some common elements here in terms of the colonial aspect of these trials. Can you talk us through how witch hunts were part of colonial conquest?
- [33:53]
C
Yes. I thought this was important to put into the book because I don't think it's really been discussed as much as it probably should be in the writing of witchcraft trial history. So we start with the very early colonial period in the 1620s. Yes. And I wanted it also not just to be about the quotes, New World of the Americas, but also about the European mainland. So the first trial where this comes up is, as you say, in Norway and Scandinavia, where the indigenous people are the Sami, the indigenous people of the Arctic Circle. And it's they who are accused of witchcraft alongside the settler women who have come from the south here, from Denmark, from the Faroe Islands, from Scotland, from all of the places that are looking to push settlers out into that northern area and are accused alongside of the indigenous people. And then we move to Joan Wright's case in. In Virginia, and we start looking at Native American people. Then we move to Salem. And then, as you say towards the end of the book, we then move to the African context and the colonial ambition of the European powers there. And by the time you get to 1940s, I think, I hope what readers have noticed is that indigenous people are often the first to keep accused in a witch trial. Whether that's a trial which is literally about practicing witchcraft, or whether it's become something else, which is a bit more about suppressing subversion or suppressing rebellion or the politics of race. And those people get accused because they're associated with magic. Because one of the things that the colonial powers do as part of their scapegoating of a variety of different individuals, individuals in their society, is saying, well, those people over there, they're not like us. They may be pagans, they may be devil worshipers. They look different to us. They behave differently. Their language is different. This makes us suspicious of them, of course. Aha. They must be witches. And that happens to the Sami. That happens the Native American people in the story of Salem, Tituba, Tata Bay, as I've called her in in the book, trying to give her back something of an identity that she had before people started demonizing her as this. This, you know, witch figure. And the people involved in the Lesotho case in the 1940s, who are two local African leaders, I tried to give each of them sort of access to that narrative, if you like. It's not an exact match. It does change over time, as so many of the big themes of the book do. It flexes according to which historical period. Period is being written about and what the context is. But I do think it's the same picture. I think it's colonial powers looking for an other and having identified it sometimes in a racialized author proceeding to hold a witch trial which helps them to dispose of their supposed enemies.
- [36:47]
B
I think actually that's one of the things that's so interesting that witch trials are able to be so flexible. And because we think of them, them, I think often in the popular imagination as such a specific thing and in such a particular time and place. Simply the realization that they are this flexible is actually something quite useful to have people think about, I think.
- [37:12]
C
I hope so. And it was something that continually surprised me. You know, when I started looking at which trials to. To discuss, of course, I thought about the way that we think about the witch trial in history and as you say it is often a very static thing. You know, we think we know everything about it and oh well, they're all quite similar, aren't they? And of course there are similarities. Yes, but they're also quite important differences. And once you've got the idea that the witch is still a very current figure, and I've had that idea for some time, but you know, it's really Donald Trump who, who helped me to see that it was more current than I had thought. Thought, and obviously the people like the QAnon conspiracy theorists, people who think that, you know, figures like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are witches and satanic child abusers and so on and so forth. I hadn't noticed those people as much as perhaps I should have done. It's so easy, I think, particularly in the academic context, very easy to say, well, that's just mad, isn't it? You know, that's just conspiracy theory. But once you think about it in the context of the long history of the wit trial, you think, hang on, yeah, but what was demonology? That was a conspiracy theory. How like a modern incel, for example, is somebody like Heinrich grammar? There are definitely similarities. You can't say that they're the same. But what if you do try and look at that big long historical picture and look for those similarities and see if they lead you anywhere. And I did feel like the book was taking me on this journey of discovery towards just realizing how relevant witch trials are. They haven't stopped. You know, the idea that the era of the witch hunts is over is something that I really don't believe in anymore. Yes, of course, the witch trial, as we conceive of it traditionally stops in the 18th century. Ish. But then even those trials go on in modernity, people are still being accused of witchcraft in very large numbers around the world and killed because. Because of that. And it is just the kind of witchcraft that we often associate with a traditional witch trial. Harming neighbors, worshiping the devil, subversive activities against Christian authorities. And then beyond that, we've also got the metaphorical witch trial, which absolutely also doesn't stop and carries right on. And often, I mean, it would be very easy, I think, to say, oh well, everything's a witch trial, isn't it? But I, I've tried to pick trials where there is a specific magical element where the word witch is used and it's thrown into against the people being persecuted as an insult, as a way of silencing them, etc, because I think the trials continue. Yeah. And I, I really had to rethink my whole teaching practice as well, because I now want to teach. I already taught a. A module which was quite long in its historical scope. You know, it started with Malice Maleficar and ended broadly with kind of Harry Potter and modern cinematic and, and televisual representations of, of witches. But I hadn't really thought about it as anything beyond text, if you like. And now I think actually it is well beyond text. The idea hasn't stopped. So what do we do with that? And I've tried to reconceptualize my teaching to be essentially a history of persecution, which I hope gets students started with the now and then, gets them to look back at the history and think, well, actually there is a main major pattern in human behavior here, isn't there? Is there anything we can do about it? Who knows? It doesn't appear so, but at least we can look at it over the course of time. And the witch trial is a really good way of framing that. Viewing of the history of persecution, I think.
- [40:51]
B
Why do you think it continues so strongly?
- [40:56]
C
It's a horrible question, isn't it? And it was quite depressing really, surveying the history of it, particularly in the present political moment. You know, when you are seeing conspiracy theories triumph, when you are seeing persecution legitimized by state regimes, when things seem to have fallen back from the progress that people thought that they were making in, in recent decades and where authoritarianism and injustice just seem to be flourishing. Wherever you look, look. So it's quite a depressing insight. I do think it is probably built into the imaginative structures that we have about the world. You know, a lot of that analysis of binary structures is Stuart Clark's from Thinking with Demons. I think that was such an important book in getting us to think about the big picture of why people persecute witches and what they mean by the idea of the devil. I think it's probably sort of baked into us. I think the way that we structure that world is so often a binary one. And even breaking that down into smaller units, we still find ourselves making comparisons. We always compare and contrast. We look for differences and similarities. And that really does encourage us, I think, to, to think in twos. And when we do that we also go along, you know, and you can see this obviously in, in older analyses, people like an Encisu talk about this. You know, this. It's a very, it's a very simple and quite old fashioned insight in some ways. But I think once you apply it to the history of the witch trial, it just becomes very, very visible, that human trait. And I'm not really sure that we can change that. I think it's. It's baked into the way that we analyze the world. And academics are no different. Sadly, there's been some interesting comparisons throughout the historiography of witchcraft of academics, of witch hunter hunters, which is very saddening. But, you know, we kind of are, in a sense. We're always looking to analyze and. And categorize and box things up. And we do, to some extent, I think, sometimes dehumanize our subjects when we do that, because we're so keen to categorize them as this type or that type or this era or that era. And the more that we divide history up in those binary ways, the more we. We're actually not really addressing the complexity of human history. So, yeah, a depressing insight. And I'm not sure we can change.
- [43:25]
B
Well, maybe we can do something about it. Or perhaps I will ask you to consider it if. What would you kind of. What questions would you like people to apply to current events, to news reports after reading your book?
- [43:42]
C
Book, I want people to look at any group that they're being encouraged to persecute and think, do these people have any of the characteristics laid out in this book that categorize the witch, that define the witch? Is what we are doing demonizing people either literally or metaphorically and figuratively in some way? You know, are they primarily women? Are they people who are racially different from the main group who is doing the persecuting? Are they people who are poorer than the kind of mean average of the group who's persecuting them? Are they being accused of some kind of sexual impropriety or sin? Are there other things that make them stand out? Is their philosophical position or their religious position different from those around them? Are they. Could you see them as heretics in one way or another? And I think if they pass at least, you know, two or three of those tests and they do have those characteristics, I'd like people to think a bit harder about. About whether what they're being asked to do in persecuting or demonizing that group is really fair, or whether they are falling into the classic human error of scapegoating, holding a witch trial.
- [44:55]
B
I think that that's a very fair challenge to a lot of people. And I think your students taking your revamped History of Persecution class will have many tools in order to do that. And I guess that leaves me only with my final question, which obviously, besides Massively revamping the way you teach this subject. Is there anything you might be working on now that this book is done, whether or not it's a book, whether or not it's about witches, that you'd like to share with us?
- [45:22]
C
Yes, there is. Yes. I was lucky enough to get a lever Hume Grant to do this. And so the next thing that I'm working on will be that project. We've started it now. I'm working with Tabitha Stanley as the postdoctoral research associate and chief brilliant, and we're working on a big history of the Witchfinder General slash Matthew Hopkins trials of the English Civil War in Eastern England. Yeah, there will be a book coming out of that and some articles and a teacher's pack and some other lovely stuff. We might do a couple of podcasts we're already tweeting about about it. People can find it under Witches, Seth and Hunt on a variety of different platforms. And it's what I'm trying to do is one of the things that I've done in previous work and done to some extent in the book that we're talking about today, and that's really cast the attention on those who are being accused trying to tell their stories rather than the stories of the witch hunters and to give those people back their voice and to really pay attention to every little bit of archival and evidence that we can get at about those people. One of the things I've noticed in my writing before now is that sometimes we ignore whole classes of records because we don't necessarily associate them with what we're looking for. But if you look at, you know, wills and deeds and parish records and everything that you can possibly access about a community across a broad strand of a couple of decades, say, what else can you learn about they people? So it's going to be a history of that big witch hunt, which has to some extent been studied before, but never in its entirety. It reaches across seven counties and we really have now, for the first time, the tools to look at that volume of records. So obviously, you know, you can digitize thousands of photographs in a couple of days and then take time to analyze them. You don't need quite the input of resourcing and time and all of the things that you might once have needed to do a project like that. I mean, once upon a time, that would have what? That would have taken you 10 years. Now we can do it a lot more quickly and we can do it a lot more assuredly. And we're asking different questions. And the questions are you know, who are the silenced people here? Not necessarily. What is the big picture? What is the data? What categorizations can we apply to these people? But actually, you know, this woman here, this. This woman here, Ellen, Helen. What did she say about herself? Can we hear anything about her life in what's being said about her? So that's the next project. Yeah, it's about a witch trial, but it's about a series of witch trials, once again in a specific context and trying to hear once again, the voices of the accused.
- [48:07]
B
Well, that sounds very exciting. We'll have to have you back when that book is ready. But in the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing, Witchcraft A history, history in 13 trials that's just come out. Marian, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast to tell us about the book.
- [48:22]
C
Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [48:39]
A
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